This post is part of a series sponsored by AgentSync.
Insurance is a highly regulated industry, and with a producer workforce turning over as a generation retires and rewrites their businesses, reducing time spent on manual data entry for both internal and external teams is key to long-term growth.
When I assumed the role of president of Bridger Insurance Services a little more than a year ago, one of my first priorities was to streamline the business. As much as the industry likes manual, I was ready to fire “manual”
;.The appointment was one of those processes that was too manual and required too much hands-on attention for a company that has hundreds of offices around the country. Before working with AgentSync, our process went something like this:
- A producer would email us or call us to ask to be cast
- Our team would send a PDF of our agency agreement, an electronic transfer agreement, a W-9, etc.
- The manufacturer would send everything back with copies of their licenses
- Our staff would manually type everything up to enter into our customer relationship management system and policy administration system
It was a horribly inefficient process, despite looking much like the process of many insurance companies operating in our space.
Gaining efficiency through process improvements
Before I came on board as president, Bridger was already working with AgentSync and had implemented an agent onboarding portal to automate this process. This is a highly regulated industry, and we can only keep appointments and do business with producers who are properly licensed. So synchronizing National Producer Numbers (NPNs) and being able to notify agencies to inform their producers of their continuing education (CE) and licenses was a great way to ensure compliance.
The first step of automating producer onboarding and meetings helped advance our reputation as a technology-forward company. Yet we are seeing the insurance industry change, with longtime agency owners leaving the industry and selling their businesses. So when I saw that our portal still had about 40 questions, I knew we had some room for improvement.
When it comes to online processes, if something is too long or complicated, there will be a dropout in completion. So we audited our portal to critically look at the data we collected. We tried to experience the process that our users would do and understand where the bottlenecks or pain points were. And we decided that there were many places where we could create even more efficiencies beyond a digitized version of our onboarding process.
The customer success team elevates the partnership
Taking a manual, paper-based process and making it electronic is not the same as being modern or digital. We know that our partners don’t have time to spend 45 minutes on a meeting request – be it digital or on paper. So we started a conversation with the AgentSync team about how to further streamline our onboarding and meeting process.
One of the challenges we faced was managing producers and agency partners in hundreds of locations in different states. Rethinking our onboarding process would require a lot of hands-on learning, and fortunately, the AgentSync Customer Success team proved up to the task.
From field mapping between AgentSync and our e-signature tools to removing required fields and ensuring the user experience was stable, the AgentSync team was with us every step of the way. Not only did they do what we asked, but they engaged with us to provide feedback and input on ways to improve our process as well.
The team at AgentSync saw this as a challenge to improve not only the Bridger experience, but the AgentSync solutions as well. Knowing we had a team behind us, committed to delivering something that really works for all of us, made the process much easier. Instead of taking hours to type and retype information, fields are filled in automatically on our platforms. Our potential partners can register online, access the portal and request a meeting in minutes. Our administrators check applications to ensure all information is there, then click a button to create a signature package. I sign it, the producer signs it, and we’re done. And in all of this, we know that state-specific compliance rules are baked in so we don’t worry about missing them.
Over time, these efficiencies turn into profit. In the last 12 months, we’ve grown our business by more than 450 percent, so having an efficient, automated and streamlined onboarding and hiring process is critical.
Using innovations to meet a changing industry for growth
Long-term employees in industry are aging. While there are many statistics to back this up, even anecdotally, Bridger sees a lot of people retiring and selling their businesses. Most of these sales end with name changes, major entity changes, and a whole process of changing information for the business units and manufacturers involved.
We’re expanding our base even as this industry shift occurs because we’re making this shift easy, with e-signature tools and auto-fill integrations into our other systems, all of which make it easier to attract new agency owners and retain the companies we already contract with. However, there are many carriers out there that still use written paperwork to manage these changes.
Taking advantage of technology puts us above. Instead of recruiting new offices by having to make a long explanation of why they should sit with an hour or more of printing, filling and scanning paperwork, we can present potential partners with a QR code where they can request a meeting directly from their phone.
Partnering with AgentSync has been part of this vision – we’ve come to expect the responsive communication needed to implement changes as we see them, and we know we can get answers or meetings with our AgentSync team on a scale of hours, not days. It has set us up for success in better targeting our opportunities in untapped market areas, taking advantage of market cycles and leveraging our momentum to grow and scale.
At Bridger, we’ve seen operational efficiency, effective compliance and our partners’ experience converge in this rapid onboarding process built on modern insurance infrastructure. As market conditions continue to drive these innovations, we look forward to what comes next.
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